John Schanz Receives InfoWorld Technology Leadership Award

By Tony Werner
|
Jun 15, 2012

In case you missed it — my colleague and friend John Schanz was notified last week that he's among this year's InfoWorld Technology Leadership award recipients, for the yeoman's work he's put in over the last several years on the "big iron" of the Comcast network.

John being John (decidedly not the kind of guy to go on about himself), he's crediting his team for the results that put him in the spotlight. So let me take this opportunity to tell you a few things about John that he wouldn't tell you himself.

Before he joined us at Comcast, our video, voice and data traffic ran on separate fiber networks; now, and because of him, they run on one converged backbone. Carrying capacity: more than 4 Terabits per second of data — every week.

John architected the Comcast backbone, and connected it out out to our regional area and content delivery networks. Without that, we wouldn't have been able to light up the nationwide IP connectivity that enabled us to blend television, broadband, social networking and apps, with simple navigation, across multiple IP-connected devices — iPads, iPhones, Android devices, Xboxes, and lots still to come.

In short — he and his team "webified" us, and did a great job of it.

This is the first time Comcast has ever been honored with a technology award of this kind. It's rewarding and exciting to see "one of us" standing tall (and I do mean tall) beside honorees from DreamWorks Animation, Fidelity Asset Management, UPS and Abu Dhabi's Executive Affairs Authority.

All that plus he's a super-great guy to work with — hard working, dedicated, with an innovative spirit. Thanks John, and congrats to you and your team, from all of us.